Sunday, September 01, 2013

Seamus Heaney, and Ships that Sail the Air

by J J Cohen

In memoriam Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013

Shortly after news began to circulate of the death of Seamus Heaney, Facebook and Twitter burgeoned with favorite quotations from his oeuvre and memories from his recent readings (especially at gatherings this summer in Edinburgh and Dublin). The generous flow of loved lines seemed perfect tribute. On FB I offered the following personal memory.

RIP Seamus Heaney, who changed Beowulf forever -- among many other poetical wonders. My single personal encounter with him was during a lunch at the Faculty Club to welcome the first year enrollees of the PhD program I was attending. Nothing says "welcome!" like a ridiculously formal meal in an ornate setting with assigned seating, no introductions, and food you don't eat. I nervously took my allotted chair between Seamus Heaney and Helen Vendler as something en croute was served. A chain of silent obscenities swirled through my head. "I don't belong here," I whispered to Heaney, because in my immaturity I did not know what else to say. "Neither do I," he replied.

Seamus Heaney changed Beowulf forever. Some think for the worse -- but for me, he made the poem teachable. Students love his love for it.

I mean that. I've been teaching Beowulf for a long while, and have witnessed a clear divide between classes before and after Heaney's translation: a time during which it was hard work to convince students to desire the poem versus one in which that desire is activated in swift, uncanny, and beautiful ways. His translation of the Old English poem has sometimes been disparaged as Heaneywulf, but that to me is its strength. His Irish intensification of the medieval work as a multi-temporal rumination on postcoloniality, endurance, and long history is why the Heaneywulf works so well. His poetics are conservative and familiar, admittedly, making his popularity too easy to dismiss. But that comfortableness does not mean that his method and content lack complexity. For those who prefer more experimental modes of translation Heaney is also an excellent gateway.

When news of Heaney's death arrived I was hard at work on a section of an essay that explores an Irish and British tradition behind a segment of his poem Lightenings. "The Sea Above" (as my piece is called) is my contribution to the volume Lowell Duckert and I have put together as a follow up to our recent postmedieval issue on Ecomaterialism (I blogged about the conference that launched that project here). Elemental Ecocriticism will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2015. You'll find the list of contributors in my blog post. There will also be response essays by Stacy Alaimo, Timothy Morton, Cary Wolfe, Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino. I'll post more about the project here soon.

In the meantime, though, I thought I'd share with you an excerpt from "The Sea Above" that does some work with Seamus Heaney's work. Let me know what you think.

The Sky as Sea

Towards the end of the eleventh century, Bishop
Patrick of Dublin catalogued in formal Latin verse the twenty-seven wonders of
Ireland. These native mirabilia range
from a stone that triggers tempestuous rains and an island where the unburied
dead never decay to a fountain that turns hair white, a tomb that when beheld
by women causes farting, men who transmigrate their souls into wolves, and a rock
that oozes blood. The marvels joyfully violate the presumptions that quietly structure
everyday life. Climate is no longer indifferent to human activity, death is not
organic oblivion, the tomb fails as a terminus of agency, humans may love the
animal for its inhumanity, and the lithic becomes creaturely. As quotidian certainties
dissolve, ecologies of the possible wondrously flare. Listed as Patrick’s
nineteenth marvel is De naui que uisa est
in aere, “Of a ship glimpsed in the air.” The bishop writes:

A king of the Irish once attended an assembly

With quite a crowd, a thousand in beautiful order.

They see a sudden ship sail the sky,

And someone who casts a spear after fish:

It struck the ground, and swimming he retrieved
it.

Who can hear of this without praising the Lord
above?[i]

An
unexpected vessel glides the clouds, celestial intrusion on a day otherwise given
to earthbound affairs. An astonished crowd discovers that the air they breathe
is sea, that fish, spears, and sky-dwelling swimmers course its elemental
materiality. What had seemed a distant expanse for placing angels, fiery
spheres and other incorporealities, an emptiness through which things move
without encounter or touch, becomes inhabited, substantial, perturbingly
entangled with life lived upon the ground. The thin substance through which
human bodies move unthinking firms into a support for strange fish and lofty
navigators, an ocean turbulent with changed perspective.

This aerial ship is predictably cited across the Internet
as evidence that UFOs once visited medieval Ireland. Yet Bishop Patrick quietly
stresses not the futurity the vessel might herald but its arrival from an even
stranger place, a compound and heterogeneous past. He provides his Latin lines with
a patina of antiquity through deliberate archaism. The Irish are the Scoti, the name the Romans bestowed upon
these people when they raided ancient Britain. Though I translated the phrase
as “Lord above,” Patrick describes the Christian God as “the Thunderer,” an
epithet stolen from the sovereign of Olympus (Jupiter Tonans, god of thunderbolts). The bishop’s story of sailors
over Ireland and the blue become the deep possesses venerable textual precedent.
In the Irish annals, cloud-sailing craft are recorded for 743, 744, and 748,
depending on the source.[ii]
The Annals of Ulster, for example,state laconically that “Ships with
their crews were seen in the air.”[iii]
Patrick may have obtained his story of airborne vessels from such an archive,
or he might (as John Carey has argued) have truncated the narrative from an
analogue to the account that appears in the Book of Ballymote, which likewise
describes an aerial ship. Congalach was
a tenth-century high king of Ireland. During a political gathering he spots a
vessel in the clouds. Conversing briefly with one of its sailors makes the king
realize the dangers of the ordinary world, and offers a chance for him to extend
humane affect across what might have been an unbreachable divide:

Congalach son of Mael
Mithig was at the assembly of Tailtiuone day when he saw a ship moving
through the air. Then oneof
them [i.e. the ship's crew] cast a spear at a salmon, so that it came down in
front of the assembly. A man from the ship came after it. When he seized one
end of it from above, a man seized it from below. "You are drowning
me!" said theman aloft.
"Let him go," said Congalach. Then he is released, and swims upward
away from them.[iv]

One
of twelve monarchs who were supposed to have held the entirety of the island
under their dominion, Congalach reveals here a wisdom lacking in the man who
grabs the spear from the navigator and triggers a near drowning. He comprehends
that for those aloft the air we breathe is sea, that danger inheres even in transparent atmosphere.

Bishop Patrick of Dublin writes at a nexus in the
transmission of the tale, as it mutates into further versions. For on the
ground, historical reasons the episode will eventually be relocated to
Clonmacnoise by the Shannon, an important monastery that built a reputation for
wonders. Once tethered to this new foundation the narrative comes to feature an
anchor stuck in the floor of its chapel and a swimmer who descends from the
boat to free the embedded object. Seized by the curious monks, the sailor
pleads for his life: “’For God's sake let me go!’ said he, ‘for you are
drowning me!’”[v] Once
released he swims upwards to his ship with the retrieved anchor. Seamus Heaney
culminates this long Hibernian tradition when he celebrates the Clonmacnoise version
of the wonder in a sequence embedded in his meditative poem Lightenings:

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise

Were all at prayers inside the oratory

A ship appeared above them in the air.

The
anchor dragged along behind so deep

It
hooked itself into the altar rails

And
then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A
crewman shimmied and grappled down the rope

And
struggled to release it. But in vain.

‘This
man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’

The
abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So

They
did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back

Out
of the marvellous as he had known it.

With
sonorous assertiveness Heaney accomplishes fully the perspective shift inherent
within the medieval tales of navigated ether. Out of the marvellous as he had known it: when the sky becomes
roiled waters for unknown mariners, when firm ground is rendered ocean floor, when
unexpected fish, aquatic javelins and wayward anchors turn air to brine and
altars to reefs, prospect shifts. Impalpable air thickens to tempestuous surf,
creating a denser version of what Julian Yates calls “the mutual or medial
impressions left by the confluence of cloud and human person – the imagination
become weather report.”[vi]
Ecological enmeshment wondrously materializes, and habitual modes of dwelling are
upended. Familiar terrain becomes unheimlich, un-home-ly, for (to quote the
poet William Carlos Williams), “the sea is not
our home .... / I say to you, Put wax in your ears rather against the hungry
sea / it is not our home!”[vii]

How much more so when that sea is sky. Displaced
from our practices of quotidian habitation – from the assemblies we attend with
throngs, from the hushed regularity of the cloister -- we might enact a
theological impulse and declare that the stone upon which we raise our houses and
the wind against which we secure the door are not ours to own. We might turn
our attention to divinity and cry that mundane life is brief sojourn, that the
eternal home is elsewhere, that a Paradise after death awaits. Yet paradeisos means “enclosed park”: can we
really desire to reside forever behind walls?[viii]
In the late Middle English poem Pearl,
for example, the narrator twice chooses a life among sorrows over the stillness
that holds the gem-hewn dwellings of heaven.[ix]
His earthly inclination is at once a religious failing and a powerfully
comprehensible human choice to mourn the daughter he has lost and to love the
green world in which he dwells. Like that anchor lodged in a world-not-to-be-endured,
like that sailor who swims deep air and risks drowning for discovery, we could linger
for a while in this dangerous space, this sky become sea, this world that is
the world in which we dwell, elementally reconfigured. Upon hearing or reading
such a story, we might even cast our eyes cloudward in the hope of glimpsing
some vessel glide, unmoored for a few moments from the terrestrial tethering of
our lives. If mundane expands to become
more fully sublunary, if the “under
moon” of which that adjective is composed stretches upwards to embrace a heaving
vastness between landed lives and closed, incorporeal heaven, then for a moment
we might be loosened from our earthly boundedness, unfastened from what Dan
Brayton calls the “terrestrial bias” of our ecological frames.[x]

[i] From his poem De
mirabilibus Hibernie (On the Wonders
of Ireland). The Latin is from The
Writings of Bishop Patrick of Ireland, 1074-1084, ed. Aubrey Gwynn, S. J.
(Dublin: The Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, 1955) 64-65; the
translation, somewhat loose, is my own. Patrick was bishop of Dublin from
1074-84.

[ii] John Carey, “Aerial Ships and Underwater
Monasteries: The Evolution of a Monastic Marvel” 16. The references to aerial
ships are in the Annals of Ulster, Tigernach, Clonmacnoise, and the Four
Masters, as well as some manuscripts of Lebar
Gábala.

[iii] Entry for 749, but annals are one year ahead at
this point. See the Annals of Ulster in
the CELT (Corpus ofElectronic Texts),
http://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/T100001A/index.html

[iv] Quoted and translated in Carey, “Aerial Ships”
17.

[v] See Carey, “Aerial Ships” 18ff for the story and
the likely historical background to its transfer to Clonmacnoise.

[vi] “Cloud/land – An Onto-Story,” postmedeival 4 (2013): 42-54, quotation
at 43. He continues with some lines I will echo but amplify later in this
essay: “However, scan the skies, however you may, I defy you to discern a
finite agency, the ‘hand’ of this or that divinity, of Providence, a final
cause, human or otherwise, even as you place one there. The weather remains an
open system – that by your gazing you reduce to a dwelling” (43).

[viii] Cf. Tim Ingold: “It is perhaps because we are so
used to thinking and writing indoors that we find it so difficult to imagine
the inhabited environment as anything other than enclosed, interior space” (Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge
and Description [London: Routledge, 2011]119). Though the authors of these medieval stories undoubtedly
spent more time outdoors than most readers of this essay, the conditions under
which inscription of their texts occurred would have been within enclosed
habitation.

3 comments:

Somehow this reminded me of the moment in Woolf's Mrs Dalloway when everyone stops to watch the skywriter. Another throng bedazzled by an airship:

"Suddenly Mrs Coates looked up into the sky. The sound of an aeroplane bored ominously into the ears of the crowd. There it was coming over the trees, letting out white smoke from behind, which curled and twisted, actually writing something! making letters in the sky! Every one looked up."